‘HABITUALLY HOMED’: EXPLORING THE CONCEPTS OF HOME AND HOUSE THROUGH DISPOSABLE THEATRE AND THE DISPOSABLE HOUSE PROJECT

This paper was written by Prerana Chaudhury, when she was a Student and Research Scholar, JNU, Delhi. Prerana is a writer currently based in Guwahati.

‘You shall not build a house again for me.
All your beams are broken,
the ridgepole is shattered.
The mind has become freed from conditioning:
the end of craving has been reached.’

-          Siddhartha Gautama

I. INTRODUCTION

The Disposable House is a project undertaken by Delhi-based theatre- practitioner and artist Samudra Kajal Saikia. It largely addresses the concerns of shifting spaces and the thematic of inhabitation, juxtaposing the clichéd binaries of inside-outside, body-soul, home-house and public-private. In a global world where such conundrums are visible everyday and where shadow-lines between individuals, communities and regions get constructed and de-constructed alternately, Saikia’s effort is to bring in all these dualities within one homogenous unit of universality; a universality that does not deny the idiosyncrasies of atomised identities and their specificities but one that is inspired by the ideal of egalitarianism. Indeed, such a conception is overtly romantic and he does not deny upon that fact when questioned about it. But the propositions behind it do not divorce themselves from socio-political commitments that he endeavours to fulfil through his art. In many ways the beams of this project lie as much in contemporary global ethics as in traditional folk roots of Assam. The credibility of Saikia’s project lies in this very aspect- that it brings together the macro and the micro seamlessly through faith and creativity. The art works resonate with spiritualism without being separated from their political notions.

‘Disposability’ is one constant theme that the artist plays with through his art and practice. We can blame it on the influence he has had by devouring the poetry of medieval Sufi saints like Lalon Fokir whom he mentions time and about in his own poetry. The metaphor of the body being the house of the soul is something he derives from the philosophical renderings of these poets, an idea that blends in with the conviction he has about art and what art is. Hailing from a family of theatre practitioners in Assam, Saikia remembers growing up identifying with this family vocation, that of a performer, an identity he embraces and assumes without constraint. It is through this inherited identity that he takes on his personal quest for self-discovery; the body of the actor in him becomes the vehicle for his sojourn to seek his primary soul-identity. The search for an identity through layers of human identities we assume everyday in a complex multicultural world of today is what comprises this phenomenological drive. The Disposable House Project also instigates me to think in the direction of what purpose art really serves in a post post-modern sort of world, are we really in need of moving out and ahead of the fragmentation that post-modern art and theory have come to endorse and uphold in jubilation? Is art not necessary to be situated inside a society that is constantly being torn apart by violence and difference such that it can in some way redeem the fragments and pull them to form a ‘whole’, even if on a purely creative level? The question about whether art serves any moral purpose has been debated and discussed throughout history. In stressing for a realm of art that would not adhere to the narrow concerns of social hierarchies and bourgeois norms, and instead bring it out of spaces like the gallery, makes Saikia’s approach to art democratic and inclusive. The idea that performances and art works are disposable is very traditional; it is liberating in its non-reproductivity and captures Peggy Phelan’s idea that it is the disappearance and tracelessness of performance that gives it its unique characteristics by setting it free from the bases on which capitalisation of art takes place. It is disappearance, also, that privileges non-structured and organic aspects of memory and reconstruction of remembered images in retrospect through selective cognition that makes every individual viewer and participant of that event unique. Saikia concept of disposable theatre- theatre encompasses one-time performances without repetitions and encompasses this very idea. According to him, a performance does not render any special privilege to the actor-performers; the performative ambience outstretches the contributions of merely the performers to accumulate the viewers in that they are present and viewing the ‘enactment’. Every performance event, he says, is of particular value and flavour which is achieved through a collective mode, of actors and viewers alike, each of them a performative participant.

II. ‘THE HOUSE ALLOWS ONE TO DREAM IN PEACE’

 I shall elaborate on a disposable theatre performance that was undertaken under the Disposable House Project as a part of a series of performances called ‘Inhabiting the Museum’. Called HouseHOLD (with a bolded emphasis on the ‘hold’), the performance was ‘enacted’ on 27^th November 2011 at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. The museum is a public space that houses objects of antiquity with distinct ‘historical’ value. It is a systematic organisation and representation of collective memory through which narratives of dominant history get created and in turn, absorbed by common people who frequent these spaces. We who visit a museum space are not contributors to it in any manner; we play the role of passive receptors of knowledge and information that it posits ‘objectively’ as history. What is history if not institutionalised memory, memory that is selective and biased? The archives that form a part of and parallely create public memory are ones that also silence and keep in shadows the voices of the larger community of marginalized. Is not the discipline of history in itself a process of ‘museumisation’?

The performance of HouseHOLD began not just on the evening scheduled for its performance but on the preceding night itself when the performers stayed overnight in the museum seeking to appropriate this space into a ‘domestic’ sphere, if only temporarily. The onslaught of the performers’ bodies into this space that resigns itself to a non-ordinary, condensed form of existence ritually ‘cleanses’ it of its proclaimed civic role and makes it a liminal sphere wherein all its members share an equal communal status. Within the time span of the performance, time, that is otherwise frozen and static inside a museum space, begins to move as in everyday life. There is movement of performers and viewers inside it, everyone contributing to the ‘personalisation’ of the public space and imbuing it marks of oral records. For the performance once over the museum assumes back its structural role yet significantly and radically enough, HouseHOLD has added to its history a moment of intervention- political and artistic- which cannot be rubbed off from its timeline. The concept of civilisation always displays comfort with the idea of categories; and these demarcations between different social groups are created by the polarity between ‘more’ and ‘less’. The ideology postulated through disposability is to counter such categorisation through art and acknowledging how every individual, on whichever side of ascertained power equations governing social existence, is a maker of history. That public memory and collective remembrance of the past can move beyond codified history and museum walls by countering such formulations with individual memories and experiences is what the notion of the ‘disposable’ encapsulates. There is a metamorphosis of the self when it steps out of the marginalised edges it is relegated to in society, and makes a movement into the interior. Saikia’s endeavour in artistic practice is essentially a journey into this direction to resurface lost accounts of suppressed histories and oppressed communities.

Coming back to the description of the performance per se, each visitor of the performance was given a stamp-mark on his wrist with a potato-cut, another household object. Musical instruments comprised of utensils, pressure cookers, buckets and tins. Once inside the museum, visitors are supposed to take little cut-out boxes of ‘wish-fulfilment houses’; this, alongwith the potato-stamp mark, makes the performance ritualistic. As a ritual process it accommodates viewers and performers alike, uniting both into Turner’s notion of the communitas. The fact that these wish-fulfilment houses are tokens that accompany the viewer back to his/ her home after the performance concludes is meant to signify art as continuum. Like memory, these tokens are residues of the performance that has disappeared now, though in a tangible form. If located inside Phelan’s framework of the ontology of performance, Saikia’s attempt to hold onto that which has been performed in a more corporeal manner might be equated with the act of writing about a performance, to which Phelan does no lend support as it makes the performance traceable. The hierarchy in her proposed theory of performativity is between a performance that can be reproduced and that which cannot be, situating the latter above the former. The HouseHOLD performance resonates the idea of transience but which can be recalled through, traced back in memory more concretely through the token-house, an object that physically itself lends itself to the viewer-participants personal sphere- like his/ her home- and manifests itself in an active construction of the performance-memory simply by virtue of its presence. The idea of continuum is further suggested by the absence of curtain call or definitive conclusion to the performance.

One important section of the performance which personally struck me is when the actor-performers bring in boxes which they then begin to open in full view, revealing striking paintings done inside each. This scene is emblematic of the movement towards interiority for self-discovery that has already been mentioned about. That aside, it is the call for digging into untold versions of history that are kept locked-up by the self-proclaimed shenanigans of society, the ones who occupy positions of power. Besides the spiritual dimensions of Saikia’s artistic pursuit, his commitment is also towards the resurgence of his cultural roots from Assam, one of the seven northeastern states of the country that has been constantly surviving on the peripheries of nationalistic discourses. Folk motives abound in his paintings which consistently reflect a blurring of the figures or their faces, an ambiguity that is symptomatic of the ‘outsider’s’ understanding about this region of the country. The ‘house’ in all civilisational narratives has been given a superior status, an abode is signifier of privilege not just in terms of a physical construct that gives shelter but also as an emotional space- a ‘home’- that nourishes the individual’s well-being. Yet, a ‘house-home’ is identified only as a static building that is rooted to one particular place which leads to the identification of nomadic communities as essentially homeless. This unquestioned fusion of the concepts of home and house commodifies the more emotional, organic and non-structured idea of ‘home’. Discourses surrounding the house-construct do not accept liminal tropes of the tent or similar other make-shift spaces that could also provide for as houses to some people or communities, because of the disposable nature that accompanies them which doesn’t fit into comfort zones of the bourgeoisie. The idea of disposability is edgy and unacceptable to the façade of progress and development that societies crave to create and sustain. The dispossessed and homeless are therefore reduced to peripheral existence in an unequal society; a series of migrant labourers in the city’s construction sites were interviewed as a part of this project. They survive on the fringes as an irony, their makeshift tents of tin and tarpaulin standing in sharp construct to the massive buildings they help construct. The example of these labourers provides for a bigger metaphor- it is to say how history and society has always been created by the powerful few by subjugating the rest.

I shall now trace the idea of a disposable house to an Assamese ritual that is performed during Bhogali or Magh Bihu, the harvest festival celebrated during the month of January. Temporary, disposable houses called bhela-ghor are built for this celebration. On the night of the community feast called uruka, people of the neighbourhood gather together for the feast which is prepared in the open air by several people together, followed by the entire community eating the meal cooked of newly harvested rice and several other traditional dishes. Then everyone spends the night inside the bhela-ghor and early the next morning, these houses are burned down to the accompaniment of prayers for a bountiful harvest the following year. The ash of the burnt-down houses is spread in the fields.

The essence of time being circular is still prevalent in folk narratives, unlike the teleological format of forward progression that mainstream models of history endorse. Disposability isn’t a threatened within a circular understanding of time; the disposed, the destroyed, contribute to rebirth and reawakening. Within traditional knowledge, therefore, the disposability isn’t permanent disappearance from the schema of social history; it is needed, on the contrary, for new creations. Here is a poem by Siddhartha Sankar Kalita on bhela-ghor (translated from Assamese):

On the eve of Magh Sankranti

We used to make Bhelaghar.

We made the structure out of unripe bamboo beams

And laying the hay over it,

When the harvesting is over,

We challenged each other on our skills of making the house

...and the grand feast was in the evening.

A little prayer was on our palms the next morning.

And then

Fire!

A grand fire event would happen,

Burning our house down in no time,

The craft of our immature hands were disposed

When we were grown ups

Many colourful thoughts

Started building a house within ourselves.

That was burnt by the fire of our youth

We were burnt, we were hurt

But flamboyant thoughts started building

A house inside.

A thought can generate another in itself.

So even after the destructions

We thought of this house as a permanent one, a concrete one.

It was just another story of

The Bhelaghar

Made with our unripe hands...

The poem demonstrates how building thoughts and memories are in themselves disposable, shifting processes that do not have any fixity but are organic and free-flowing according to the whims of the mind. Building the bhela-ghor is a community process, a ritual activity. It is the core construct of the ritual feast of Bhogali Bihu within which the people live and set it aflame soon after; in this manner the house or the ‘body’ serves only a ritual purpose which is soon to be disposed off following the fulfilment of its role. The disposable nature of the house doesn’t reduce its significance within the festival or in the context of an overall Assamese cultural identity. To look at this process of collective house-building also attacks the notion of individuality that we tend to associate with the space of a house/ home. The search for a private space inside the house has been a constant theme/ motif in many modernist texts of Western civilisation, for instance within existential philosophy or even the feminist movement of early 20^th century (Virginia Woolf’s writings in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ can be used as a reference). The corollary to human and spiritual freedom has always been individual existence; in folk aesthetics and cultural norms we see that the path to ritual completion and fulfilment has often been a collective, community process which requires the involvement and contribution of each individual but without a prejudiced value-system attached to the figure of the same. This is common not just in the building of ritual-specific houses like bhela-ghor but also in the building of houses in rural communities for residential purpose. The alienation between the constructor-builder of house/home we witness in urban existence is absent in rural areas where even now, huts, called kheri-ghor in Assam, are still built by people from within the community. This activity is on a decline with more and more people opting for a concrete house now-a-days. A building-process which is disappearing can be said to be symbolically persisting through the cultural norm of the bhela-ghor which has retained its sanctity and continuum till today. In semi-urban areas, these houses are not made in a full-fledged manner but often in smaller versions to fulfil the ritual purpose only. The traditional idea that embraces a communitarian characteristic of the house/home has been usurped by the urban idea that the house/home is only an individual, private space. The latter is a ‘materialistic’ space according to Saikia which accommodates objects and commodities to fill in its empty spaces and give it the dimension of a ‘home’. According to him is filled by individual aspirations and the totalitarian experience of everyday urban life, and ironically reflects itself as the normative space of normal existence a common person aspires to. In the same stretch of argument, a disposable, makeshift space in the urban scape will house only the dispossessed and the ‘homeless’. Herein lies the problematic of associating the idea of ‘home’ to the physical construct of a house. As Bachelard says, ‘…it is not enough to consider the house as an “object” on which we can make our judgements and daydreams react. For a phenomenologist, a psychoanalyst, or a psychologist (…), it is not a question of describing houses, or enumerating their picturesque features and analysing for which reasons they are comfortable. On the contrary, we must go beyond the problems of description- whether this description be objective or subjective, that is, whether it gives facts or impressions- in order to attain to the primary virtues, those that reveal an attachment that is native in some way to the primary function of inhabiting. …In every dwelling, even the richest, the first task of the phenomenologist is to find the original shell.’[1]

III. THE BODY-HOUSE OF THE ACTOR

‘I lose myself in my own house.

My house is so full of people that I cannot enter

                                                    my own house’

The metaphor of the body as the dwelling for the soul is common in the Sufi poetry of Lalon Fokir, Azan Fokir and many others from which Saikia draws upon. Being an actor, the body-soul dichotomy now manifests itself in the binary between his self as a common man and the self that belongs to the performer. The performer-self in him seeks for a liberation that is to transcend the duality of identities; as a performer his quest is to attain that level of oneness or union with the soul such that he loses that intense attachment with the body, it being ‘disposable’. On the contrary, being a performer results in an acute awareness of the self through the body because it is through the body that enactments are carried out; without the visible presence of the body, the performer’s energy would not find any medium to flow out or to get expressed. It is this paradox that defines the actor’s being. This idea is also reflected by Barba his article ‘Burning the House’: ‘The subterranean history of theatre has been my house. I have wandered in its rooms to discover my professional identity. In its dark corners I have come across my ancestors and the legacy they have entrusted me with: my roots and my wings.’[2]

The body houses the soul and together they create human existence, memories, thoughts, and ideas and set each other free. A house is not all beams and poles and walls, it is not then the material objects it houses; it when ones emotions and sentiments people the physical spaces of the houses that it becomes a home. For instance, inside one’s house/home too, there is always are always some specific spots, nooks or rooms where we are most ‘at home’. To quote Bachelard again- ‘…all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home… we shall see that the imagination functions in this direction whenever the human being has found the slightest shelter: we shall see the imagination build “walls” of impalpable shadows, comfort itself with the illusion of protection- or, just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls, mistrust the staunchest ramparts.’[3] Among the multiple selves that inhabit a person’s body-soul lies the quest for the true soul, the truth of one’s lifetime. That is the task of the actor-performer; by inhabiting selves in a dispassionate manner, he must keep the search on. The human tendency is not of detachment but of attachment which leads to complexity in this search. In his poem ‘Disposed’, the artist says:

‘This body of mine is my house. Wherever I go, I carry this house with me. Or, say, this mobile house brings me within it.

I cannot go out of this house. If I do, I’m no more an actor’

The house-home is an intimate space; the body-house of a being is, again, a disposable entity. All that it encompasses within its lifetime, all identities and memorabilia, thoughts and conceptions, a continuum of our past, familial and cultural, all shall come to an end with its penultimate disappearance one day. The body can be said to be the most basic of unit of performativity, hence. To sum in Barba’s words: ‘My small tradition has confronted me with a question: how to escape the veracity of the present and preserve a splinter of the past, safeguarding its future?

My answer was: tradition doesn’t exist. I am a tradition-in-life. It materializes and transcends my experiences and those of the ancestors I have incinerated. It condenses the meetings, tensions, misapprehensions, dark sides, wounds and the many paths on which I continuously lose and re-find myself. When I disappear, this tradition-in-life will be extinguished.’

  

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[1] Pp. 4

[2] www.soulamericanactor.com/essaybarba.shtml

[3] pp. 5